The Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker Read Free Book Online Page A

me. “There are only three other women here.”
    I wasn’t sure who or what, exactly, he was worried about, and Ididn’t know the proper protocol, so I just smiled and nodded. I knew if he wanted the male photographer to shadow me to the bathroom, we would never be flown to the fighting nearby, close to the border with Pakistan. Every day I asked for a “bird,” figuring that if I used military slang, it would help. Every day I was told no. And I could see why—soldiers were actually fighting the Taliban down near Bermel, and as journalists, we were the last priority for the precious air slots available, slightly below mail. So instead, the photographer and I were sent out on trips with a platoon of combat engineers who were so bored that the leader carried copies of
The Complete Guide to Investing in Rental Properties
and
Own Your Own Corporation
with him on patrol.
    “Oh, it’s going to be a long, boring day,” he said at the beginning of one. Then he realized that sounded bad. “That’s a good thing.”
    That day alone, we visited five villages. The soldiers had several missions. To find out about Afghans in army uniforms robbing so-called jingle trucks, the acid-trip trucks from Pakistan that transported most food and supplies in the region and featured fluorescent fantasy paintings and dangly metal chains that clanked together and sounded like “Jingle Bells.” To find out about a nearby IED. To find out about an alleged insurgent named “Hamid Wali” or maybe “Mohammad Wali,” no one seemed sure—names here frankly as common as Jim or John Wilson. And always, their mission was to win hearts and minds, to convince the Afghans that they were there only to help.
    We started by walking around a market in Orgun, where stalls sold everything from pirated DVDs to live chickens. One soldier bought a teapot for $3. A staff sergeant tried to build rapport with the shop owner, who wore a pakol, a traditional hat that resembled a pie with an extra roll of dough on the bottom.
    “We’re just trying to collect information about a robbery that happened less than a week ago,” the staff sergeant told Pakol. “Local nationals in green uniforms robbed a jingle truck on Highway 141.”
    The optimistically named Highway 141 was a one-lane dirt road. Pakol looked suspicious. “We don’t know. We come here early in the morning. We leave here late in the evening. We haven’t heard anything.”
    The staff sergeant tried another question.
    “IED on the way to Sharana?”
    “We don’t know about this,” Pakol said. Then he waited a beat. “If we see mines or something, we’ll let you know.” He waited another beat. “But if you want tea, we’ll give you tea.”
    With no objections, Pakol blew out dust from a few cups and poured from a pot boiling on a gas canister. We all sipped green tea.
    “Did you come to help us or what?” Pakol asked, after the first cup was gone. That was Afghan tea protocol. Always wait for a cup of tea to ask a serious question. Pakol then ticked off his complaints, the things he wanted the Americans to fix.
    “The dust is really bad,” he said.
    “There’s always gonna be something,” the staff sergeant replied.
    With that, we left the shop. As we trudged along, everyone stared at us, making it difficult to shop. I knew why: Here were men in army uniforms, flak vests, and helmets, twenty-first-century soldiers carrying guns, looking like unbeatable futuristic fighting machines, establishing a perimeter, looking, checking, in the middle of a fifteenth-century dusty souk. I walked in the middle, wearing a headscarf beneath my helmet, trying to bridge two cultures. I looked at the translator, a nineteen-year-old kid from Kabul. He had wrapped a scarf around the bottom of his face like a Wild West bandit and put on sunglasses and a baseball cap.
    “What’s up with the outfit?” I asked him.
    “So the people don’t know me,” he said. “The Afghans here say you are not a Muslim